Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature

(Hardback)

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Chinese belt toggles, known as zhuizi (), are small carved ornaments that offer a rare glimpse into everyday life in early modern China. Used as counterweights and fasteners to pouches that hang from traditional Chinese garments, toggles became popular along with the rise in tobacco consumption from the 17th century. More than personal accessories, toggles were wearable symbols, combining form and function to embody Chinese folk traditions, beliefs and symbolism, all while demonstrating material culture and craft skills. Today, they can speak to 300 years of Chinese culture across various levels of society.

Coinciding with an exhibition of the same title at the University of Sydney's Chau Chak Wing Museum, this publication, Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature, brings one of the world's largest collections of Chinese toggles from Powerhouse Museum together with multifaceted analysis on the objects' histories and materials by art historians, archaeologists, scientists, and curators.

Edited by the exhibition's curators, this book allows a larger audience to engage with these unique objects, pairing academic enquiry with detailed photographic documentation of both the exhibition itself, and the catalogue of 80 toggles.

It is hoped that Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature will spark new curiosity around this under studied art form and that it will continue to spread and further our knowledge of these delightful reminders of lives and times past.